Your Weekly Guide to VRV 2/19 – 2/25

You’re waiting for the walk signal at a crowded city intersection. Your breath forms into temporary clouds before dissolving into the clear, frigid air. You hear a tinny, artificial tone and look up to see the sign has changed to ‘walk.’ You look down at your phone as you’re walking, weaving in and out of the vast surge of pedestrians ebbing and flowing like a living river. Halfway across the street everything falls silent. You crash into the person in front of you and look up, dazed, frantically apologizing. “I’m sorry, uh-” You stop midway through your sentence. The entire world is frozen. People, feet extended half-gait; birds suspended in flight; the ripples of a puddle caught in some strange temporal stillness–time has stopped. You stand there, for how long you don’t know, not even trying to make sense of anything, but simply taking in the reality of it all. You get up and begin to walk, haltingly, through the street. You see a child on the sidewalk, his rubber ball trapped halfway between his open hand and the floor. You reach for it, grab it, attempt to move it, but it is immobile as a building. You explore the city this way, experimenting here and there as you did with the ball, but everything is similarly stuck. After hours (days?), you collapse on a park bench. Looking at the morning sun (it’s been morning for so long) winding through the tree branches overhead, your phone suddenly vibrates. Shocked out of your reverie it takes a moment for you to even remember what to do in this situation. You grasp your phone and see that an unfamiliar app has opened, something called… “Your Weekly Guide to VRV.”